A care home fees cap designed to reduce the number who have to sell their
homes is fundamentally flawed, says Richard Dyson

The Care Bill, which is limping its way through Parliament, will fall far short of its aspirations. The first of these was to make clear to families how much they might be expected to have to pay towards their long-term care. The second aspiration was to put a cap on those costs, so that after a reasonable contribution to the fees, the patient could still leave an estate of value to their heirs.

The bill is destined to achieve neither.

A High Court judgment last week went in favour of the daughter of a woman who had been in care since 2006 and challenged Worcestershire County Council's desire to sell her mother's home to meet her care home bills.

The case challenged in court for the first time the rules relating to other family members living in the home belonging to the person needing to go into care. Here, it was the daughter of the owner, who also claimed the property as her home. Worcestershire is now seeking permission to appeal.

Whatever the legal niceties of this case, it highlights the crushing pressures on local authorities to meet and minimise care costs, pitted against the desperate wishes of families to preserve their assets.

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The Care Bill doesn't address the key problems exposed here in weighing up so-called "eligible" assets. If anything, it is likely to make the financial assessment of patients more difficult and fraught, if only from a logistical point of view, as more and more receivers of care seek to be assessed in detail so as to benefit from the proposed "cap".

And here we arrive at the problems of the cap itself. Well-intended and attractive in theory, the cap is supposed to be a lifelong limit on how much any individual contributes to the cost of their care. You pay, and when you reach the cap you are deemed to have paid your due. The state takes over and what remains of your assets is for you and yours.

The cap is proposed to be set at £72,000. But because it doesn't cover the "hotel" element of costs - food and accommodation - and, more crucially, because it will take into account only the maximum a local authority would be prepared to pay for the care, rather than the actual cost, it would take many people years to benefit from the cap.

A council may be prepared to pay £500 per week, while the care being provided costs £650. And the hotel elements, say, cost £250. In that scenario the clock ticks toward the cap at a rate of just £500 a week, and might reach it in just under three years. By that time the person would have paid £130,000. And even after that, they would still be liable to shoulder the difference between the council's maximum payment and the actual cost - plus the hotel element.

Not only is the cap of doubtful financial value, it also poses logistical nightmares for families and local authorities. At the moment, families in many circumstances (some 81pc, according to research from 2013) tend not to press for detailed financial assessments because they perceive broadly that they will fail the means test and have to pay.

But once the cap comes in, everyone will need a full assessment in order to benefit - wishful thinking though that may be - from its effect.

Imagine the burden on local authorities. The scale and complexity of disputes are hard to overestimate.

Nor would these be one-off. With the clock ticking away toward the £72,000 cap, it would be very much in families' interests to ensure that eligible costs racked up as swiftly as possible.

As we have reported, care providers are not always good at breaking down their costs into what might constitute board and lodging on the one hand and care on the other.

A week ago Labour MP Liz Kendall raised the problem in a Parliamentary committee debate on the bill, calling on the Government to produce guidelines so that people "do not end up confused about what they have been charged and what they have paid towards their care".

The cap is supposed to apply from next year. It is difficult to view it as anything but another casualty in the ongoing battle to deal with the crisis of care costs.